IV
by Liliana Graves

Runestone, volume 12

An animal knows the ground
it rose from.
Pants in a prairie with an ear cocked.
Like you, I knew home
quite well.
It didn’t make us one and the same.

But I know that
I came when you called.

And I know that it shone
where I waited.
I was driven by a great hunger.
I was burdened.
What you saw in me
shivered and pressed, birdlike,
searching,

narrow-boned. And you did not
break me,
but let me rise into your breath.
And I know that it renewed me,
and I knew I would never
forgive it.

And I would
come if you called –

from a riverbank, or a shallow marsh,
with your shoulders taut and used.
Yes, you called for me,
and hot water sank in my body.
Behind us our range rolled blue
and then vanished.
Behind us, blue, and gone.

The destination was not the ground
we rose from, it was not wild
or bordered.
We were not remembered there, not in
the tongue of dark cobble
or the walking colonial wood.

We entered into a bed
of aspen, where the cricks met
like capillaries,
where the sky sank in hushed violet,
and still
we were not known.

But we stared down into
the heart of it,
where it could be seen
beating, and your arm curled
around me,
corralled our heat.

And when you called again
you carried me.